As much as this might qualify as the best moment of my entire life, lactic acid is staging a full-scale mutiny in my legs. After nearly two hours in the water, I can feel the cramps forming like distant thunder.
We both wordlessly agree it’s time to head back. When we reach the shore, I collapse into the wet sand, letting the tail end of the waves ripple around my arms and legs. Beside me, Holden lies down, careful to leave space between us, but close enough that I can hear the rhythm of his breath syncing with the tide.
“This was the best dive of my life,” I say, still smiling at the sky.
“Mine too,” he says.
I whip my head toward him, startled. “Seriously?”
He shifts slightly, turning to face me. “Why do you sound so surprised?”
“I don’t know, I guess I figured you’d done hundreds of dives by now.”
“I have,” he confirms. And that’s it.
I glance back at the sky. “You’ve accomplished so much already. I think that’s why people find you so intimidating.”
His brow lifts. “Areyouintimidated?”
I take a moment. “Maybe a little. But not because you’re older. Or because you’re a total grump—” I grin when he groans in protest. “It’s more that… everything I want to do? You’ve already done it. It’s hard not to compare.”
He shifts again, propping himself up on one elbow. “First of all, I’m only three years older than you.”
“And a total grump,” I repeat, just to hear him huff again.
“You’re exhausting,” he mutters. But there’s a hint of a smile.
He holds my gaze longer this time, and his voice drops a little, quieter, more deliberate. “Second… everything I’ve done? You’ll do. And more. You’re brilliant, Coralie. I’ve never met anyone who sees the world the way you do. Don’t waste your time measuring yourself against other people’s timelines. Especially not mine.”
I nod, swallowing around the sudden tightness in my throat. “I know. I’m not worried I’ll do great things.”
That gets him. I don’t need to be looking straight at him to feel the shift—the hesitation, the flicker behind his eyes. I’ve spent years learning how to interpret the posture of threatened cuttlefish, the subtle shift in an octopus’s pigment when it’s hiding something. But I never learned how to read a man who smiles like he’s trying not to.
And that’s what he looks like right now. Like he’s proud of me for saying that out loud—and hates himself for letting it show.
Here, in this moment, there are so many questions pressing at the back of my teeth that it’s a wonder they don’t spill out on their own. I want to ask him whether, under different circumstances—if he weren’t my TA, if we had met at the beach or in a café, or anywhere that isn’t a campus—he would have let this become something. Because I struggle to believe this lives entirely in my head. He told me it did. He told me to shut it down, to crush it before it grew teeth. But unless I am wildly self-absorbed or catastrophically misreading him, this cannot be the way he exists witheveryone.
I want to ask whether Summer scorched something permanent in him. Whether science has taken up all the space where intimacy might have lived. Whether loving anyone feels reckless after losing Jacob, like tempting fate into taking something else he can’t afford to lose.
More than anything, I want to know whether these feelings—mine—will ever be allowed to exist outside my own body. Whether one day he might acknowledge them without flinching. Or whether I will always remain safely categorized: student, boundary, line not to cross.
But the questions stay lodged in my throat, heavy and unmoving. Part of that is fear—because answers are irreversible, and I’ve learned that sometimes uncertainty is gentler than certainty. And part of it is exhaustion. I’ve spent weeks seesawing between trying to let go entirely and trying to understand what this is, and I’m not sure which takes more out of me.
For as confusing as this is, it’s still better than the month of polite distance that followed my confession. Better than the hollow ache of being reduced to a nod in the hallway. I think—quietly, shamefully—I would rather have this version of Holden than none at all. As a presence. As a constant. As someone who shows up, even if only in the ways he allows himself to.
Maybe that’s self-destructive. It probably violates several of my own rules, including the Barnacle Rule and at least ten others designed to keep my heart from bruising too deeply. But Holden Wilkes didn’t enter my life as something simple. He arrived as both the question and the answer, and I don’t see him leaving anytime soon.
I don’t know where he fits in my life. I only know that the shape of him is already carved into it.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Fieldwork has a way of stripping you bare. You stop pretending you’re in control. You get wet, sunburnt, mosquito-bitten—and more alive than you’ve ever been in a lecture hall.
That’s exactly what the last four days have felt like. After the fever dream that was my solo day with Holden at Cormorant Bay, we actually got to do what we came here for: collect data, run transects, lose feeling in our legs after three hours in a wetsuit, and remember—painfully—that the ocean doesn’t care about our schedules, no matter how nicely formatted the dive plan is.
Our first dive reflected that.
Technically, everyone followed protocol. No one touched wildlife. No one interfered outright. But excitement has its own way of breaking formation. People drifted. Heads snapped toward movement. Buoyancy control became… aspirational. At one point, Mateo very nearly abandoned the concept of group cohesion altogether in favor of attempting tobefrienda reef shark, which Holden did not find as charming as Mateo did.
